Toms River Township Administrator Paul Shives (center) speaks during a state Senate hearing in Toms River on the response to Superstorm Sandy. With him are Toms River Police Chief Michael Mastronardy and Councilwoman Maria Maruca. THOMAS P. COSTELLO/staff photographer

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SEASIDE HEIGHTS — Rumbling through floodwaters in a half-track military vehicle, Seaside Heights Police Chief Thomas Boyd saw pieces of his town traveling in the opposite direction.

“We saw cars going by, a lifeguard stand went by. We found the boardwalk in the bay,” Boyd told visiting state senators Monday at the shattered Casino Pier. “The ocean was like a river, it took everything with it. ... Because of that 13-foot surge, that’s what crushed us.”

At the Legislature’s first public hearing on post-superstorm Sandy rebuilding needs, Ocean County and municipal officials stressed, above all, they need the Army Corps of Engineers to pump sand and establish new, bigger dunes to keep future storms at bay.

“The barrier island protects the mainland,” said county Freeholder John C. Bartlett Jr., who testified in Toms River before the state Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee.

Bartlett explicitly linked beach replenishment and new dunes as a way to reduce storm surge, which on the night of Oct. 29-30 raced up Barnegat Bay and smashed bayshore neighborhoods as though they were on the oceanfront.

“We were looking at the map and said, ‘How could that much water come througth Barnegat Inlet?’ It didn’t. It came over the top,” Bartlett said. “Where you have the high dunes, 20 to 25 feet, waves are not breaching” the barrier beaches as they did at Mantoloking and Ortley Beach, he said.

When Vice President Joe Biden visited Seaside Park on Nov. 18, federal officials told him $200 million is the rough estimate for rebuilding Ocean County beaches, Bartlett said.

“He didn’t bat an eye, but he didn’t have a checkbook, either,” the freeholder added.

Monday’s hearing at the Toms River town hall was just the opening round in a historic debate over how the 21st century Jersey Shore will take shape. Some officials are taking aggressive action, anticipating federal aid — but don’t want upper levels of government telling them how to rebuild.

Within days, Belmar officials will go to bid for a “new and improved boardwalk” and seawall for $26 million, to be complete by Memorial Day, said Belmar Mayor Matthew Doherty. The Federal Emergency Management Agency likely will reimburse the borough for 75 percent of that cost but “we need assurances there will be no strings attached,” Doherty told the committee.

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With property owners pushing to get back into neighborhoods and start rebuilding, local governments need “a quick determination on what can be done,” said Ocean County Administrator Carl W. Block. “We’re starting to get questions now — ‘Well, what can I do with my house?’ ”

But the dunes and beach have moved dramatically in many places, Block said. Maria Maruca, a member of the Toms River Township Council, said decisions must be made on where to rebuild, particularly in Ortley Beach, where storm waves tore up streets and might force the seaward building line boundary to be moved west to leave room for new dunes.

Along with 3,000 damaged houses in the beach neighborhoods, Toms River has 1,500 houses on the mainland — many of them year-round residences — that need major repair before they can be habitable, said Township Administrator Paul Shives.

In all, some 9,000 structures were affected by the flood, and it will take three to five years for Toms River to rebuild, Shives told the senators. In the meantime, with perhaps 20 percent of its property tax base affected, the township will need major aid from the state to keep providing local services, he said.

Some 225 houses are totally wrecked or just vanished, Shives said.

In Brick’s beachfront enclaves, the toll was 109 homes, many of them destroyed by fire, said Mayor Stephen Acropolis, who saw three burn down just on his block.

Between 7,000 and 10,000 other homes were hit by the surge in varying degrees, Acropolis said, and some $400 million in taxable property could be gone. Acropolis called for the state Department of Environmental Protection to delegate its Coastal Area Facility Review Act powers over coastal development to local governments for a period of two to four years as communities rebuild.

Debris in Barnegat Bay and lagoon communities is another issue on which the DEP and Army Corps should take a lead, Acropolis and Maruca said.

“Our waterways are the lifeblood of our community,” Maruca said, telling of lagoons clogged with debris and sand washed across the peninsula. “We need to get residents into their homes and rebuild our tourism economy.”

As flooded homes are gutted and repaired, Acropolis suggested it might be time to require certifications that houses are mold-free before they are sold — just like termite certifications that are a condition for many real estate sales.